Search and replace text in metadata

[johnbeardy]

Another plug-in, this one searches the metadata for text and replaces it - more here.

John

[Fredrik_Norrsell]

Thanks John,
It works great. This is going to save me from doing the round trip to iview for appending text.

Fredrik

[johnbeardy]

Glad to hear it, Fredrik. Hope you noticed I updated it the other day, so it now previews the results.

John

[markpirozzi]

Does anyone know how to write the filename to the Title field from within LR?  (I know you could do it outside of LR and then read metadata from file.)

Mark

[johnbeardy]

It's also something that can be done with the SDK. Tim Armes LRTransporter can already do this, and a plug-in that I've been writing (user definable custom fields) also includes such a feature. It would be relatively easy for me to peel off and include within my search and replace tool....

John

[markpirozzi]

John

I have a situation where I use the same IIP metadata preset for all my cameras but back in March a weird thing happened concerning the files of just one of the cameras - Adobe products can't see the metadata.  It's there and the same preset is used on the files of other cameras.  I've been writing the filename, via Bridge, to the files that will be imported into LR prior to importing into LR. And of course this LR function would be useful after importing photos that are not mine.

Mark

[johnbeardy]

OK, check out version 1.0.3 of the plugin (same URL as above).

It now includes a transfer function that copies the context of one field to another - so it will do a filename to title. It's pretty crude right now. I'd like to shorten the list of source fields, and also add an append as suffix / prefix option.

Does this fix the issue?

John

[markpirozzi]

John,

LR Plugin Manager doesn't recognize the S&R Text download - there's no plugin file inside the folder - do I install some other way?

Mark

[johnbeardy]

Sorry, Mark, that was my mistake. You can either download the fixed version, or change the name of the folder to BeardyReplace.lrplugin.

John

[markpirozzi]

Wow....works great on transferring Filename to Title.

You say this version is rough which means you may tweak it in the future.  Having your settings stick when you reopen the plugin would be useful.  A Reset button could be provided to get back to the default.  Not sure if all this is possible with this type software/language.

Thanks, Mark

[johnbeardy]

I've already updated it and ironed out the aspects I thought were too rough. It's now at 1.0.4.

I rather wish I'd had the time / made the effort a year ago, but I'm almost certain your suggestion can be done (in fact Tim Armes' similar LRTransporter tool does this already). I'll start off by saving the last used target and source fields....

John

[markpirozzi]

I'll start off by saving the last used target and source fields....

Saving the last used fields is where the real time savings is.  The Reset button idea is only useful if someone was tied to the default for some reason, however there are no tricky settings that I can see.

I did notice the Search + replace function can have the unintended consequence of renaming the extension part of the Filename when renaming the other part - this wouldn't happen very often but the user needs watch out for this - the preview comes in real handy for checking on this.

Thanks, Mark

[johnbeardy]

I've got the last settings working OK (not yet uploaded) and I think I'll leave it at that. Glad you like the preview feature. I had been struggling to learn Lua and only recently decided to force myself to have a real go at it, but that preview mechanism really felt like I was achieving lift off.

If you put incorrect data into a field, it's worth knowing that Lightroom's SDK has one very clever feature that most other scripting environments ignore - code-driven changes to field values can be undone by the user. While saying that, it's also worth knowing that I may have found a bug where undo fails to restore previous data in the title field. Other fields are OK.

John

[markpirozzi]

John,

The preview is a very valuable feature in this useful plug-in.  I think it's a necessity to have a preview when you start renaming/replacing text in more than a few files.  Your time spent providing a preview function is appreciated.

Mark

[jimHere]

Does "BeardyReplace.lrplugin" go in the Modules folder?

-- Jim